June 6, 2012, Snow Mountain Ranch, Dave and Carolyn Thomas

June 6, 2012, Snow Mountain Ranch, Dave and Carolyn Thomas.  Dave Thomas serves on the YMCA of the Rockies Board of Directors.  He and Carolyn will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in July of this year.  Carolyn and Dave lived in Saudia Arabia for 21 years before his retirement.  They spend their summers as volunteer staff workers for the Y.  They are remarkable people who aren't content to while away their retirement.  They want to give back and help the YMCAR, a place and an organization which has meant so much to them and to their family. 

The Thomases worked at the Estes Park Center last summer and breathed life into the lifeless library there.  They are doing the same thing here at Snow Mountain Ranch this summer.  Carolyn does a blog which promotes SMR with wonderful and colorful stories about the many activities and places here. Both created geocaching and have planted about a dozen caches all over the ranch.  It is a little like a scavenger hunt where clues are given to a cache.  If a searcher finds the cache, he may remove one of the trinkets from the cache and replace it with one of his own.  He then signs the log and moves on to the next cache.  The motivation is that it will take guests to parts of the 5000-acre ranch which would otherwise go unexplored.  Great idea. 

We found Carolyn this afternoon and spent several hours catching up on their activities since the last Board meeting.  Tonight, they took us to dinner at PI, a bar and eatery in Parshall, CO, about fiftheen miles west of Granby.  We took the backroads to Parshall and saw some great relics of past ranching operations.  We passed a tractor-trailer rig loading cattle from some free range land on the way.  In Parshall, we saw a tepee crafted with elk antlers and another ski fence. 

Afterwards, as day turned into night, we went to the Rowley homestead located here on SMR.  The pictures above show what life was like in the Colorado Rockies in the late 1910s and early 1920s.  Almost all of the structures have been preserved and much of the equipment used to scratch a living from the rocky soil are still there.  It is a facinating place.  We made our first trip to SMR  in 1976.  We've been back more than a dozen times.  I did not know the Rowley homestead was there.

Carolyn and Dave are stalwart ambassadors for YMCAR.  Annie and I are very proud to call ourselves their friends.